According to the AP, 911 service was knocked offline in Southern California. "An equipment problem knocked out long-distance telephone service and parts of the 911 system for tens of thousands of residential and business customers in several Southern California cities Tuesday, officials said.

(sarcasm alert) Gee, I wonder if the FCC will step in and force the traditional carriers to be in full 911 compliance with 7 nines of reliability (99.9999999%). Better yet, since the carriers did not inform their customers of any potential outage due to their lack of redundancy, I think the FCC should fine the carriers for this 911 outage and force the carriers to notify their customers that 911 may not work. I demand immediate action by the FCC to remedy this unacceptable 911 service!

After all, the FCC is forcing VoIP providers to notify their customers of their 911 limitations or else the VoIP providers must cut their service.

p.s. Maybe the Southern California carrier (Verizon) should check out Internet Telephony Expo (also in Southern California) next week for any 911 redundancy solutions? I'm sure with the inherent "nuclear proof" nature of IP packets (re-routable), there is probably an IP solution to help build 911 redundancy in legacy carrier networks.